With the growing popularity of online communications, it is becoming very easy to intrude into someone's privacy. Although sending important information via an email might sound more technological, secured and convenient, it basically involves huge risks. I mean, how difficult is it to crack someone's password? And if not the password, surely the guessable answer to the security question can give the owner away. All you need is some basic info about the owner of the account and the next thing you know is you are messing around with his private emails. And all these information are not even difficult to obtain, given the efficiency of online search engines these days. Moreover, in this era of computer viruses, extracting details directly from the owner's system is a cakewalk. So with all these threats you need to take extra care to safeguard your account and emails.
Some of the effective email defence options are as follows:
• Choose a difficult password. Make your password a perfect combination of alphabets of both the cases, numbers, special characters and spaces. Also try to keep it longer than 10 characters. This will make it difficult for the hackers to guess your password. And please skip the habit of writing down your password somewhere.
• Obliterate the security question. While creating your email account, make sure you are not very honest with the security question. You got to be tricky with this. Either you choose one of the suggested questions and pair it up with a confusing weird answer or simply make a totally bizarre question of your own and answer accordingly. Remember, honest answers will make your account vulnerable to anyone who knows you even a little bit.
• Keep regular backups of your email. Get yourself an email saving software and regularly update its content. In case of loss of your account due to any mishap, you will still have the replicas of your emails to serve your purpose.
• Beware of viruses. No matter how simple and authentic a website might sight, you never know what kind of virus, Trojan or malware it can be transferring to your system. Moreover, even your email attachments can prove to be a threat. You might think you are simply responding to an innocent lottery advertisement or getting an update of some software you had downloaded, but actually you might be downloading some really malicious programs extracting your private information from your system. Some remedies for email attachment threats are:
o Avoid opening emails from unknown addresses. Stop falling for tempting advertisements and mails tickling your curiosity. Even when a known person sends you an attachment, best would be confirm the source before downloading it because nowadays spoofing is in.
o Disable automatic downloading of attachments.
o Scan your attachments with an antivirus before downloading them.
o Store your email backups under more than one user in your system including some without the administrator privileges which is essential for some viruses to work.
• Never, ever share your detailed personal information online or with anyone you personally know, no matter how close you are to him/her. Remember when you cant keep your own secret, you can't expect someone else to keep it.
Cure for split endsHome Security
